SO, after what felt like decades of negotiations, hundreds of thousands of Twitter tidbits from people ‘ITK’ and conflicting media reports every other hour, the Henrikh Mkhitaryan transfer saga finally ended. He signed for Borussia Dortmund.
Twitter and forums predictably blew up and fans who had never seen the lad play save for a Mostar Youtube clips here and there had their excuse to spew their indignation and outrage about how and why Liverpool had missed out on yet another target.
All kinds of hypotheses were dreamed up to explain away Mkhitaryan’s decision to snub the Reds.
Perhaps Brendan Rodgers didn’t have sufficient gravitas to sell his vision well enough. FSG might not have offered the right amount of cash to his newly appointed ‘super agent’ (why do I even know that he has a new ‘super agent’? Summer is crap, isn’t it?). Maybe he didn’t want 69 as his squad number.
Or maybe he just chose to move to a club that is far better placed than Liverpool.
Sounds boring and it doesn’t quite capture the imagination like a flamboyant profanity laced rant about how the club managed to mess up yet another transfer deal but I’d bet I’m not far off the mark with the assertion that a player in the £25m bracket simply looked at his options and saw our club in an unfavourable light.
It seems to take constant reminders for a lot of people to remember just where Liverpool are right now. A good second half to last season and Philippe Coutinho’s exciting emergence isn’t enough make up to mask our blemishes. We’re the seventh best team in England. We’ve not had a bad 12 months, we’ve had an awful 4 years. This isn’t a blip, it’s a reality. We’re no longer a Champions League club and to expect bona fide Champions League level players to sign up to our latest ‘project’ is to have your head in the clouds.
It seems like people at the club have realised this, at least. Whoever was leaking the Mkhitaryan info to the Echo knew it was a long shot and told the paper that Liverpool saw the Armenian as an ‘ambitious target’. No one seemed to care about that though, it was swept away by a tide excitement off the back of tweets from people who allegedly had the inside track and knew that Liverpool had the deal as good as done. It turned out that the club’s initial uncertainty about whether the transfer could be completed was well founded.
[ad_pod id=”unruly-video” align=”center”]
Since those two idiots ran our club to the brink of destruction we’ve fallen further than Felix Baumgartner and the way football is these days (‘super agents’ and all) there’s only two ways to get back to the heights we once occupied.
The first is a Man City/Chelsea spending spree. You throw copious amounts of excrement at the wall, hope enough of it sticks to get you into the top four and then you go from there. That’s just not going to happen at Liverpool. Not under FSG.
The other option is a longer game that has plenty of pitfalls and will be eminently more difficult to pull off. We need to do exactly what we did last January over and over again. We identified a couple of fringe players at successful clubs who weren’t fulfilling their potential and offered them regular football to prove their worth.
Coutinho and Sturridge are perfect examples of how Liverpool’s transfer policy can work going forward. The problem is that our success rate regarding signings has to be exceptionally high for this to work. If the club’s new signings prove to be top quality players but Liverpool fail to improve sufficiently then suddenly those lads get targeted by other clubs with greater resources and trophy prospects. That’s exactly what is happening now with Luis Suarez.
If you can grow the club quickly and reach Europe’s top money spinning competition then you’re laughing but if the team continues to flounder while your best couple of players prosper then hanging on to them becomes extremely difficult and you go back to square one.
Liverpool signed Suarez from Ajax when lots of top clubs didn’t want to risk a fairly big transfer fee on a player who had only done it in Holland. We nipped in, took the risk and he turned out to be one of the best players in the world. Now the best clubs will pay top dollar to snatch him from us and we can’t realistically hope to keep him as the team hasn’t reached the Champions League. C’est la vie.
The days of us going out and getting our number one transfer targets with ease are long gone and if we do manage to sign what seems like a low risk player in the mould of Mkhitaryan then we should react with delighted surprise.
The club had a go at getting a top level player and were trumped by a better offer. That’s just where we are right now; it’s time to get used to it.
Live4Liverpool is recruiting columnists. For further info contact the site editor at live4liverpool@snack-media.com
Follow us on Twitter here: @live4Liverpool and ‘Like’ us on Facebook
Oh dear. I was hoping nobody would burst our bubble. I struggle to disagree with any of the points you have made. I just hope that FSG take a medium term view than long-term or else Liverpool will really be stuck in mid table mediocrity.
yes coz he went to the top club in germany didnt he? to the champions league winners? nah mate none of the above.
Yh mate.
I’m sick of reading about how we missed out on this guy and how its somethinng of a reality check.
Man u missed out on thiago. I haven’t read anything about how its a reality check for them. They are champions of argueably the best league in the world but he chose Bayer. No one can say man u is better than Bayer
Isco chose Madrid over Man city
Falcao Cavani and Alexis Sanchez I think last year chose not to come to England regardless their reason.
So forget about it and move on
so ,after 23 years with empty hands we need another 10 years or so of a rebuilding process to get back to where we belong because we have no champions league.I disagree with you.a club of liverpool status can still attract good players if the people who the club act in the right way.it’s not about cl,look at Arsenal,they’re always in the cl.but still they can’t attract high profile players,they’re struggling because of their policy .Liverpool Fc is always victims of his owners and people responsible of his transfer policy. Isn’t very strange that a club like liverpool didn’t win the epl all these years.Can you mention another example of such a decline.
Even if we had got Mkhitarayan Rodgers would Not have got the best out of him. Remember Nuri Sahin?
O’ yeah, dt lad left fr sporting reason nd its a clear fact that dortmund re a better team dan liverpool. Let’s not be biased, let’s just face fact. M not saying liverpool ve not got some lad to take them wia dey re suppose to be, just dey belive its a project dey nid to carry on nd myrikian aint part of it. YNWA to dos hu really understand… Sign up erikson nd let’s clean up dis *tinz apnin.
speechless
If we can’t buy the best (which we cannot) we need to have a fantastic youth policy and actually promote our youth. Doing a citeh or a chelsea is not something I would like for liverpool. It will take a while but so be it. Be patient. I am looking forward to the likes of sterling and ibe scaring defences this season. Get used to big names passing us by. It’s the reality of the situation
very good to him but we will find someone better than him
We need serious money to get back to the top. If FSG won’t provide it ..then they should sell up
Their plan is nonsense…it will never work . Hiring a second rate manager and not buying top players is simply….moronic.
Fsg must go , or Liverpool won’t be a top club for a long long time
Lfc tried blowing stacks of money . Didn’t work . Lets be patient with thus plan and Rogers. We were third best team from January to may behind Man U and Tottenham . This year I expect a good start and to be in the mix by turn if year . Rogers by signing mkhitaryian was going for the league not just top four . He would be ridiculed if he said it . Remember too four is minimum requirement in what is a poor league . Man utd . arsenal are both struggling to strengthen. It’s wide open this year lets get behind Rogers as I think he can sense real success in the next couple of years .
Yes, off course. If you pick up isolated results, we were the best in the country . For crying outloud
You are amazingly STUPID. Rodgers couldn’t even dream of winning the league with this poor squad . Wake up man
And as I have said before . We were NOT 3rd best January to may. We were 6 th. So stop ly ing.
Get a clue man . You are a real delude if you think success is coming with Rodgers
It happens when the club has no CL football and a No mark manager in charge!
As for the money? Remember, we have spent about 25 million pounds so far on aspas, Alberto, mignolet. And there will be an additional 40 million plus for Suarez!!! This club has been let down by bad management. It is pure and simple. Mignolet wasn’t needed this year, with Reina staying. That would have given the club around 50 million pounds to find 3 players and replace the 23 goals that luis scored, plus assists and strength in depth! Meaning instead of worrying about marking luis out of the game, we would have had several options. Instead, we are busy changing keepers, messing up the defensive line up and still no replacement in sight for Suarez. It beggars belief. I thought the Dempsey to Spurs (bullet dodged) thought our amateur manager anything was not to leave things last minute….hmmm. No lessons learned. You guys need to open your eyes and face reality. Unless a top manager takes the reign , we won’t be going anywhere. So far, we had Roy hodgson (mediocrity), Kenny (shouldn’t have come back after so long out of it), and now mr swansealona taking the club to a lower level. Since Rafa was hounded out of the club by the xenophobic media and Fergies mates in the press, we have been practically manager less ! Wake up and smell the coffee. This is reality. As for our club, still one if the biggest in the world. Much bigger than Dortmund and co.
Great comment
Haiz .. we should have brought Rafa back when we had the Chance.
Reality:
Man U, City, Arsenal & Chelsea hve all missed out on the same type of signing. it happens. you don’t get them all.
We are not in champions league which is no fault of Rogers. It started under rafa and continued through another 2 managers until Rogers landed.
Not being in CL is always going to limit the top level players that are available to you.
That being said, the comment about the fringe players availability is bang on. There’s plenty of world class talent currently warming benches who would sacrifice CL football for an opportunit to play each week. Coutinho & Sturridge examples of this. There’s also going to be plenty of people who see Liverpool as a huge opportunity and forego CL for te opportunity to come here – Suarez a good example.
We’re not that far away. If Suarez stays, and with the addition of a couple of key signings which will come, our squad is looking as good as it has in many years.
Ha ha . Are you for real ? Are all.aussies this stupid ?
Not being in champ league is no fault of Rodgers ? You dope ! The manager bears responsibility.
Dude you haven’t a clue about football if you think our squad is not the worst in many many years
Wake up
Haha. Dope.
provided if we can get e signings that we want.
Mkhitaryan was good so the pursuit for his service was understandable. Everyone was disappointed when LFC missed out on him but if he was that good than why didnt Champions League teams such as Real Madrid,MU,Chelsea,MC or Bayern didnt went after him..??Did they saw something that we didnt like prone to injury. He is already going through one. Blessing in disguise for us perhaps.! So should forget about it and move on.. Muriel,Yilmaz,Soldado are more than worthy candidates available..
how old are you?
Please british writters,leave BR alone to concentrate on his rebuilding process. You people are doing us more harm than good. BR is average manager,he brought go players like countiho,sturrigde.Allen etc. You guys should always have this in back of your minds. Rom is not build in a day.whether BR is good or not we have to give him chance to transform lfc. He has vision for us.
Again if suarez want to leave, let him leave because we are good in turning striker into world class player. Torres is a withness. Solider go solider come barrack remains. If he goes another player ll emerge for sure…don’t panic my fellow lfc fan about suarez leaving…ynwa